Lo and Behold

In October 1957 the Soviet Union put Sputnik in orbit. Four months later the Pentagon created ARPA so America would not be caught short again. ARPA backed the best minds it could find and let them work. One of its bets was a network that would let any computer talk to any other. It began with two letters and grew into the internet.

1. 7 February 1958 · The Pentagon

   ARPA is born

   Four months after Sputnik, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy signs Directive 5105.15 and creates the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Its mission is to keep the United States from ever again facing a technical surprise. ARPA runs no labs of its own. It finds the best people at universities and companies, gives them money and room, and lets them build. That model will build the internet.

2. October 1962 · The Pentagon

   The Intergalactic Network

   J.C.R. Licklider, a psychologist who believes computers should work as partners to people, takes charge of ARPA’s new computer research office. He funds time-sharing machines at MIT, Berkeley, Santa Monica and beyond. In April 1963 he writes a memo addressed to the “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network” and asks how all their machines might one day talk to each other.

3. February 1966 · The Pentagon

   Three terminals

   Bob Taylor now runs Licklider’s old office. At the Pentagon he has three terminals: one to SDC in Santa Monica, one to Berkeley, one to MIT. Each needs its own login. “Well this is silly,” he later recalled thinking. “I should be able to access any of these systems from a single terminal.” He pitches one network to ARPA director Charles Herzfeld. Twenty minutes later he has a million dollars.

4. October 1967 · Gatlinburg, Tennessee

   The plan

   Taylor gets Herzfeld to lean on Lincoln Laboratory until it lets go of Larry Roberts, a 29-year-old MIT engineer who had already linked computers in Massachusetts and California over a phone line. At a symposium in Gatlinburg, Roberts lays out the ARPANET. It rests on packet switching: cut messages into blocks and let each find its own way. Paul Baran at RAND had worked it out by 1964. Britain’s Donald Davies reached it independently and named the packet.

5. 30 August 1969 · UCLA

   IMP No. 1

   ARPA’s request for bids went to 140 companies in July 1968. Frank Heart’s small team at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, won it the week before Christmas. Their Interface Message Processor is a ruggedized Honeywell DDP-516 with 12K words of memory, built to do one thing: route packets. On the Saturday before Labor Day, BBN delivers IMP No. 1 to Leonard Kleinrock’s lab in room 3420 of Boelter Hall.

6. 29 October 1969 · 22:30 PST

   LO

   Charley Kline, a UCLA student programmer, sits at the lab’s Sigma 7. At SRI in Menlo Park, 315 miles away, Bill Duvall waits at an SDS 940. They talk by telephone headset. Kline types L. “Got the L.” He types O. “Got the O.” He types G, and the SRI machine runs out of memory and crashes. Two letters have crossed. Later that night the full login goes through. Kleinrock said the message meant “lo and behold.”

   

   UCLA IMP log, 22:30, initialed CSKTalked to SRI Host to Host
7. December 1969 · Four nodes

   A network

   UC Santa Barbara’s IMP is installed on 1 November. The permanent UCLA to SRI link is up on 21 November, and the University of Utah joins in December. Four different computers, a Sigma 7, an SDS 940, an IBM 360 and a PDP-10, now speak one network. Kleinrock’s Network Measurement Center pushes it until it breaks, then fixes each fault it finds. By mid-1970 ten nodes span the country.

8. 24 October 1972 · Washington, D.C.

   The world sees it

   Bob Kahn of BBN puts the ARPANET on public show at the International Conference on Computer Communication at the Washington Hilton. A dedicated phone line feeds dozens of terminals on the floor. Visitors play chess against distant machines, run an air traffic control simulation and watch ELIZA at MIT and PARRY at Stanford hold a conversation. By now Ray Tomlinson at BBN has sent network email and picked the @ sign.

9. 1 January 1983 · Flag day

   The internet switches on

   In May 1974 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish their design for TCP, a way for any network to carry packets to any other. On 22 November 1977 a test sends packets from an SRI van in California across three networks, over the Atlantic by satellite and back. On 1 January 1983 every ARPANET host drops the old protocol and switches to TCP/IP. The network of networks is running.